Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year marketing new and existing drugs to health care providers by pharmaceutical manufacturers and marketing companies. This is a cost of business that draws financial resources away from the vital research and development efforts of developing novel drug products.
Current pharmaceutical marketing efforts involve a variety of modalities. The most traditional and costly is the direct marketing of pharmaceuticals to physicians in their office practices by a huge workforce of pharmaceutical sales representatives known as “drug-detailers”. During visits to physician offices, information on new and existing drug products is passed on verbally, with pamphlets and brochures and samples are left for physicians to try-out. Often, it is difficult for the representatives to get the attention of busy physicians and sufficient time is often lacking to inform the physicians about the merits of the various products. In an effort to supplement these efforts, pharmaceutical representatives typically leave note pads, pens and other paraphernalia that have the branded name of the pharmaceutical product embedded thereon so that the physician will be reminded about the availability of that pharmaceutical product. This system has its drawbacks because many times these particular methods of advertising are not available at the time when the physician is ready and willing to try a new medication but the dosing information is not at hand.
Another modality of marketing pharmaceutical products to physicians is via traditional advertisement in trade and specialty journals and magazines. Even if the advertisement in the journal is seen and read and the merits acknowledged, the indication, dosage and other particulars of the drug are often forgotten by the physician when the time comes to actually write the prescription in the busy office environment.
The limitations and restrictions of the above marketing modalities hamper the effective and efficient bringing of new drugs to the market and the continued sale of existing drug products. An object of the present invention is to overcome these and other drawbacks inherent to existing systems.
The ideal method of advertising of pharmaceutical products would involve placement of advertising for a drug product that is pertinent to a patients problem in front on the physician at the time the physician is seeing that patient and deciding upon an appropriate medication. This would ideally involve display of advertising onscreen within a MRSS that is used in the office exam room. The specific advertising to be displayed would be driven by the user's selection of a diagnosis or group of diagnoses for the patient on hand. Therefore, only advertising that is pertinent to the current patient's problem would be displayed onscreen during that patient visit. Such a system would give the advertiser a competitive advantage over other products in the same category.